{"id":275869,"date":"2026-05-02T10:41:31","date_gmt":"2026-05-02T10:41:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/275869\/"},"modified":"2026-05-02T10:41:31","modified_gmt":"2026-05-02T10:41:31","slug":"the-supreme-courts-voting-rights-ruling-may-reshape-texas-maps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/275869\/","title":{"rendered":"The Supreme Court\u2019s voting rights ruling may reshape Texas maps"},"content":{"rendered":"

Audio recording is automated for accessibility. Humans wrote and edited the story. See our AI policy<\/a>, and give us feedback<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Last summer, Texas lawmakers redrew the state\u2019s congressional map to add more GOP seats. The unusual mid-decade redistricting effort prompted some Republican lawmakers to dream even bigger. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the U.S. Supreme Court rules in the Louisiana v. Callais case that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional, Texas will take up redistricting again (Congressional, Texas Senate and Texas House),\u201d Rep. David Spiller, R-Jacksboro, posted on social media<\/a>. \u201cGet ready. It\u2019s coming.\u201d <\/p>\n

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court issued the ruling Spiller had been waiting for. The court did not entirely eliminate Section 2, the law\u2019s key holding that prohibits vote dilution based on race, but it did make it much harder to win a case on those grounds. The court\u2019s conservative majority declared that plaintiffs must now prove that mapmakers intentionally diluted the voting power of a racial group. This higher bar, Justice Elena Kagan said in her dissent, would eliminate the \u201clion\u2019s share\u201d of challenges under Section 2. <\/p>\n

Some states are immediately rushing to redraw their maps<\/a> under this new standard, hoping to split majority non-white areas that favor Democrats in order to create new Republican districts and strengthen existing ones before the midterms. <\/p>\n

Texas is not yet following suit, in large part because the first round of the 2026 primary is already in the rearview mirror. But Spiller and others say they expect redrawing the state\u2019s congressional, state House and Senate and State Board of Education districts to be on the table when lawmakers return in 2027. <\/p>\n

\u201cI think that we will have that opportunity and I look forward to that, if that\u2019s what leadership decides that they\u2019d like to do,\u201d Spiller said, noting that the decision to redistrict will be made \u201cabove my pay grade.\u201d <\/p>\n

Rep. Mitch Little, a Lewisville Republican, said he anticipated the state would audit its maps and see if there was a need to redraw them in light of the Callais ruling. <\/p>\n

\u201cSomeone is going to have to look at this and say, did we use race to draw majority-minority districts? And if so, that will encourage some soul-searching and review of where the lines lie,\u201d he said, alluding to the court\u2019s argument that sorting voters by race \u2014 even for the purpose of adhering to Section 2 \u2014 runs afoul of the Constitution. \u201cI think there will be an appetite to get it right, whatever that means under the Callais opinion.\u201d <\/p>\n

On Wednesday, Gov. Greg Abbott called the ruling a \u201cvictory for state sovereignty and a recognition of the inherent equality of all Texans.\u201d He did not say whether he thought the state should take another look at its voting maps; Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dustin Burrows did not comment on the ruling or respond to a request for comment. <\/p>\n

The Legislature\u2019s two redistricting committee chairs, Rep. Cody Vasut, R-Angleton, and Sen. Phil King, R-Weatherford, also did not respond to requests for comment. Rep. Todd Hunter, R-Corpus Christi, who carried the House\u2019s redistricting plan last summer, did not respond; earlier this year, he said the Callais decision could \u201cspark the discussion\u201d to redraw more maps. <\/p>\n

The silence from the state\u2019s top GOP leaders is not surprising, considering Texas\u2019 2021 and 2025 maps are still under litigation. Last summer, after four years of legal action and a monthlong trial over the 2021 maps, the judges decided to delay their decision until after the Callais ruling. In the subsequent legal battle over the 2025 congressional map, plaintiffs focused heavily on comments made by Abbott, Hunter and other elected officials to prove racial intent. And when the map was initially struck down by a federal panel, the judge who penned the decision cited those comments<\/a> as the basis for the ruling, saying Abbott \u201cexplicitly directed the Legislature to redistrict based on race.\u201d <\/p>\n

The Callais decision is likely to reopen the record for both of these lawsuits. Chad Dunn, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said Wednesday\u2019s decision was disappointing but insisted it wouldn\u2019t stop their litigation against the existing maps. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe Texas redistricting was handled so poorly that it fails even this new, more stringent test by the Supreme Court,\u201d Dunn said. <\/p>\n

\u201cA game changer\u201d<\/p>\n

The idea of redrawing state legislative districts first gained traction several months before Callais, when House Democrats left the state last summer to protest congressional redistricting. Some Republicans said it was past time to redraw their seats and give the GOP a 100-member majority, depriving Democrats of the numbers needed for future quorum breaks.<\/p>\n

A top aide to Attorney General Ken Paxton urged GOP lawmakers to \u201cplay hardball\u201d and circulated a spreadsheet<\/a> with a list of 22 majority non-white House districts ripe for being redrawn. A few days after the Legislature sent the congressional map to Abbott\u2019s desk, more than 30 House Republicans signed a letter asking the governor to call another special session to redraw the lines for their chamber. <\/p>\n

\u201cSimply redistricting congressional seats does not go far enough,\u201d the August letter said<\/a>. \u201cIf congressional [H]ouse seats are unfair to Texans then so too are the state districts.\u201d <\/p>\n

The Texas Republican Party later passed a resolution<\/a> urging Abbott to do the same, specifically calling for the elimination of coalition districts \u2014 ones drawn to protect Black and Hispanic voters where neither makes up a majority alone \u2014 in the state House. And GOP Chair Abraham George suggested that Abbott had expressed interest in the idea.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy understanding is there is about 20-plus coalition districts in the Texas House today,\u201d George said at an August meeting of the GOP\u2019s governing executive committee. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t have to be, like the governor said this morning. We want to start messaging that it should be redrawn to political districts, not coalition districts.\u201d <\/p>\n

Rep. Matt Shaheen, a Plano Republican, said the political will to redraw other maps was already there before this week\u2019s Supreme Court ruling. But now, lawmakers will have even more motivation to \u201crebalance\u201d the state House, Senate and State Board of Education maps, as he put it. He said he\u2019s optimistic lawmakers will take it up in 2027, when they are next scheduled to reconvene in Austin, rather than waiting for after the 2030 Census. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe have districts drawn today that don\u2019t represent the reality of what our state looks like,\u201d Shaheen said. \u201cIt really is more of a colorblind society, and elections are very much driven now by principles and policies, and not so much on skin color. We will continue that in Texas.\u201d <\/p>\n

Spiller, who serves on the House redistricting committee, said it was premature to speculate where Republicans could make gains if they took up legislative redistricting. But Wednesday\u2019s ruling reaffirmed that states can undertake partisan redistricting, and lifted some of the constraints that Section 2 previously put on lawmakers, he said. <\/p>\n

\u201cI think that\u2019s a game changer,\u201d Spiller said.<\/p>\n

After the Callais decision, there are virtually no legal constraints on lawmakers if they want to draw an aggressively partisan map, said David Froomkin, a political science professor at the University of Houston. But there are other factors to consider, he said. Unlike Louisiana or Alabama, where Democratic voters are more concentrated, Texas\u2019 sprawling, left-leaning cities and suburbs make it harder to eliminate Democratic seats without imperiling Republican incumbents. <\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s the tension mapmakers face, the more you try to divide the opposition, the more districts that are in danger of flipping, especially with an unpredictable electorate,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

Since Texas\u2019 midterms are already underway, the state has the luxury of waiting to see what November brings before deciding whether to embark on more redistricting, said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola University. If the new congressional map yields fewer than the five anticipated GOP pickups, lawmakers may get the memo that voters don\u2019t want this redistricting effort to continue. <\/p>\n

\u201cTexas has cranked the volume up to 11 or 12 on this, and conceivably you could run into territory where that starts blowing out the speaker,\u201d he said. \u201cI think this fall will bring political lessons about redistricting, maybe the lessons we expect, and maybe not.\u201d <\/p>\n

Additionally, the midterms could show Republicans whether to focus on expanding their majority or, in the case of a blue wave, fortifying GOP districts for 2028. Spiller echoed the call for caution, especially as the state waits to see the results of the national redistricting arms race that launched last summer. <\/p>\n

\u201cI think you always need to be careful what you ask for, what you reach for, because you might get an unintended result,\u201d he said. \u201cYou don\u2019t want to overreach. I think you need to be deliberative about how we do this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Disclosure: University of Houston has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune\u2019s journalism. Find a complete\u00a0list of them here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Audio recording is automated for accessibility. Humans wrote and edited the story. See our AI policy, and give…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":275870,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[288,392,2830,2914,27,29,1862,293,28,1863],"class_list":["post-275869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-elections","tag-greg-abbott","tag-redistricting","tag-state-board-of-education","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-house-of-representatives","tag-texas-legislature","tag-texas-news","tag-texas-senate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275869\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}